Humility for Experts

Abstract

Abstract In this paper I investigate the responsibilities of experts towards non-experts. Trust is the critical element in the relationship between experts and the lay public, but there has been a serious decline in public trust in experts in certain fields. In this paper I look at some of the failures of responsibility among experts that damage public trust in them. I then look at recent work on the virtue of intellectual humility, focusing on the work of Whitcomb et al. (2017), who define intellectual humility as the virtue of owning one’s intellectual limitations. They maintain that this virtue underlies a series of behaviors that can be empirically tested. I argue that most of these behaviors directly connect to the responsibilities of experts and their success in reaching the goals of their expert testimony. If it can be demonstrated empirically that these behaviors are linked to a common virtue, we would have good evidence that intellectual humility is a fundamental virtue for the expert.